19th Panzer Division

The 19th Panzer Division was an armored division of the German Wehrmacht that existed from 1 November 1940 to 8 May 1945 during World War II. The division was formed when a regular infantry division was turned into a panzer division, trading one of its infantry regiments for a tank regiment. 19th Panzer suffered heavy losses during Operation Barbarossa, with one of its three tank battalions being disbanded in August 1941. After the Battle of Moscow and the fighting in the winter of 1941-1942, the division was left with just one tank battalion, and the front was later sent south to support the Italian Army in Russia. The division suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and the Belgorod-Kharkov Offensive Operation in 1942-1943, but it was reinforced with an additional tank battalion. In May 1944, the division was sent to be refitted in the Netherlands after nearly being destroyed, and the division was transferred to Poland to crush the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. After the Vistula-Oder Offensive by the Soviet Red Army in January 1945, the division withdrew towards the Silesian city of Breslau and then into Czechoslovakia, where it surrendered to Soviet forces west of Prague on 8 May 1945.